The beauty of FB’s dirty laundry finally making a difference (possibly, hopefully) is that the next big social network won’t sell to them. It’d be bad publicity and there would be a mass exodus.
Furthermore, I think the next popular network would bill itself as being anti-FB.
> Furthermore, I think the next popular network would bill itself as being anti-FB.
They can try to claim that, but any business that stores people's photos, personal profiles, posts, messages, etc. would have everything it needed to become just as bad for privacy as Facebook if they wanted to. They would need to convince people that they would not do bad things with the data. But even if we trusted them, they could change their minds at any time, or hackers could steal the data.
The only way to prevent such data from being stolen is to never collect it -- but a social network without that kind of data would not be very social.
The first part of your argument is true but it's missing a key reason why FB's data collection is so troubling — they run on advertisements and use all the user data collected to sell more of those ads.
A new social network doesn't have to be advertising-focused or based.
I think what really disturbed people was not the ads, which are pretty obvious, but rather the idea that Facebook shared user data with a company that influenced the outcome of an election.
One of the ones I'm looking at is taking registrations while in closed beta. I think it is to generate a userbase who can all begin to access it at the same time when invites are sent - to hopefully gain a large amount of popularity quickly.
That's a good approach. I have a semi-open beta for my network. What's this one that you're looking at? I'm curious to see what other new social sites are doing.
Furthermore, I think the next popular network would bill itself as being anti-FB.